The Gift of a Fourteen-Century Retraction
Mary Magdalene, why it took until 2016 to say sorry, what it means for secular culture, and why today is the day to buy yourself roses and make yourself a feast.
Right now, as I finish this essay, there are roses on the altar, cut this morning, because today, July 22, is Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, the woman the Catholic church spent fourteen centuries calling a prostitute and now puts on par with the apostles. The shadow of the Magdalene mythos extends far past Catholicism into all of its derivatives and into secular culture. For anyone who was slut-shamed, desire-shamed, embodiment-shamed, man or woman, today can be a deliberate day of self-claiming.
As a girl I was confused as to why my body seemed to be everybody else’s business. I loved to dance, move, tumble, climb, swim. I was intensely sensitive and sexually curious. After, say, age 11, this became deeply policed: how I dressed, how I walked, how much space I took up, how freely I laughed. I definitely did it wrong! So many daughters of the Catholic imagination get the instruction that a “good girl” is always managing herself. Billy Joel’s long impatient serenade in “Only the Good Die Young” was a pretty clear call out of the tug of war.
Yoga was the first place I encountered a radically different possibility, and tantra cemented that. The body, it told me, especially the female body, was an expression of the sacred. In classical tantra, I met an understanding in which the body is holy, consciousness and energy belong together, and the divine feminine and divine masculine are not enemies but partners to be enthroned together in every human heart.
This essay began as a joyful edu-tainment and invitation to think about Mary Magdalene, and its not personal, its archetypal. Archetypes are the templates a culture hands its daughters before they can read. Rewrite the archetype, and you rewrite the girls, and the women, and the internal and external war over sexuality. The story of one first-century woman’s fourteen-century mis-telling turns out to be the story of millions of bodies. Archetypes work on us whether or not we believe in them, which is the bad news and the good news at once: a figure distorted at that depth wounds at that depth, and a figure restored at that depth heals there too. Her correction is a repair to the pattern itself. I hope you enjoy this, and that you FEAST.
-CMM, Easton, CT, USA, 7/22/26
On July 22, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Mary Magdalene, which is a rank of honor it granted her in 2016, equal to that of the apostles. Which is remarkable, because for roughly fourteen centuries the same institution taught the Western world she was a reformed prostitute.
This matters well beyond Catholicism. For anyone deconstructing or reconstructing, and for the fully secular too, because the shadow of the Magdalene myth extends far beyond the church into its cultural descendants. For anyone who was ever slut-shamed, desire-shamed, or embodiment-shamed, today can be a deliberate day of reclamation.
She wasn’t a prostitute, first and foremost. The Gospels give us a woman of independent means who helped fund Jesus’ movement out of her own resources. She was a patron, not merely a follower. She stood at the cross when nearly everyone else had fled, and arrived first at the tomb, becoming the first witness of the resurrection and the one sent to tell the others. Many early Christian writers honored her as apostola apostolorum, or the apostle to the apostles. Texts outside the canon go further still: the Gospel of Philip names her the companion; in the Gospel of Mary, the male disciples come to her for teaching. Whatever one believes about any of it, the literary record is remarkably consistent. This is a figure of authority, intimacy, and witness. She was neither a penitent nor a whore.
The sermon
So where did the whore come from? Largely from one sermon, preached by one man, in one terrible year.
In 591, Pope Gregory I, who was a Roman aristocrat turned monk, reluctantly elevated to the papacy while plague emptied the city was under threat, preached to a terrified people. He needed an emblem of total sin transformed into total mercy, proof that no one was beyond redemption while the world itself seemed to be collapsing. Drawing on earlier tendencies in the Latin West but giving them enormous authority, he fused three women into one: Mary Magdalene, Luke’s unnamed “sinful woman,” and Mary of Bethany. This produced a single composite character with a perfect dramatic arc.
Two choices inside that fusion are important here: Luke never specifies the sinful woman’s sin; Gregory made it sexual. The Gospels say Magdalene had been delivered from seven demons; Gregory interpreted the seven as the fullness of vice, dwelling on how she had once used her body, her perfume, and her hair for seduction before turning those same gifts toward Christ. Neither move was required by the text: they both came from Gregory’s personal conditioning.
Gregory was in the ascetic tradition, that long conversation between Christianity and Greek philosophical dualism that privileged spirit over matter, and which Augustine later gave profound theological expression by treating disordered desire after the Fall as one of humanity’s defining conditions.
Christianity, however, has never spoken with only one voice about the body. Its central claims are astonishingly embodied: God does not rescue humanity from flesh but enters it. The Incarnation declares matter worthy of union with the divine, the resurrection is bodily rather than merely spiritual, and the sacraments make ordinary things — water, oil, bread, wine — the very vehicles of grace. The Christian story has always contained powerful currents of reverence for embodiment.
Yet in much of the Latin West, the ascetic current became culturally louder than those affirmations. A tradition that increasingly made the body the site of spiritual danger needed somewhere to locate that danger, and woman (generation, blood, milk, the whole undeniable fact of embodiment) stood visibly at the center of human life. Increasingly, woman became flesh personified. The Magdalene composite is that logic finding its perfect character. (Peter Brown’s The Body and Society and Rosemary Radford Ruether are great maps for this.)
The chronology
When Gregory preached body-denial through a woman’s body, priests in the Western Church could still marry. Mandatory clerical celibacy did not arrive as a universally enforced Western norm until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, with confirmation at the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139. These reforms did more than prohibit clerical marriage. They declared such marriages invalid, reclassifying priests’ wives as concubines and their children as illegitimate.
The campaign wasn’t solely about women, it also had roots in institutional reform, concerns about church property passing through clerical families, the desire for a more distinct priestly identity. Still, its rhetoric often drew on older ideas of purity and separation, and woman-as-pollution became one of the images through which that separation was made emotionally powerful. The idea had already been doing its work on women for centuries before it was formally enforced upon the men who preached it.
The Christian East, for the record, never accepted this entire trajectory. Orthodox tradition continued to distinguish the three women, honored Mary Magdalene as equal to the apostles, and maintained a model of priestly life in which married parish clergy remained possible. The Magdalene conflation was not a universal Christian inheritance. It was particularly a Western Latin development.
The carry-forward
The Reformation is where the story gets complicated. The Reformers rejected the cult of saints, so Magdalene lost much of her devotional role. The category of the “fallen woman” she had come to represent did not disappear. It migrated into new forms. Institutions for the rescue and reform of women were called Magdalen houses on both sides of the confessional divide, and Protestant Magdalen institutions in England actually preceded the Irish Catholic laundries that later made the name infamous.
The Reformation also introduced its own tightening. With convents dissolved in many Protestant regions, the godly household became the primary theater of female virtue, and a woman’s spiritual reputation became increasingly tied to domestic obedience, marital status, and sexual history. The medieval church had at least preserved a visible category for redeemed sinners becoming saints; Protestant cultures often removed the saint while retaining the fall. That is the irony: Catholicism’s version kept Magdalene’s glory attached to the shame it had created. Strip out the saint, and you keep the fall without the glory.
The inheritance
Follow the thread forward and you arrive at the present tense. Purity culture’s rings and pledges (see True Love Waits, founded in 1993), the “used goods” rhetoric that echoes older ideas of sexual contamination, and complementarian movements formalized in statements such as the 1987 Danvers Statement all carry versions of the same inheritance: sexuality treated as something requiring regulation, especially in women. Female sexuality is often framed as something entrusted first to fathers and then to husbands, not something that belongs to the self, the person.
The fragmented evangelical traditions carrying this most strongly today don’t possess a single central authority, calendar, or mechanism for a universal correction. The correction happened inside the institution that created the Western conflation; its descendants do not all receive the memo, because there is no single address to send it to. These modern churches are often local cults of pastoral personalityies.
The whispered retraction
Because there was a correction ( two, actually), but the first was done quietly and subtly.
In 1969, the reformed Roman calendar quietly separated the three women liturgically. It was a rubric change, almost footnote volume: no dramatic announcement, no public re-education, and parish priests formed by centuries of the composite tradition often continued carrying the older story. Meanwhile the culture kept broadcasting it at full volume. The year after the quiet correction, Jesus Christ Superstar introduced a whole new generation to the reformed-prostitute Magdalene. First it was a hit concept album in 1970, then on Broadway, and the film carried the characterization for decades more (she sings plaintively:“he’s a man, he’s just a man, and I’ve had so many men before, in so many different ways, he’s just one more”)
If you grew up in the seventies, eighties, or nineties, you grew up in the gap: the record already corrected while the cultural imagination continued singing the old song. The actual Magdalene, the woman who funded, witnessed, proclaimed, and stood where others fled, remained largely unmet, sitting intact in the very book on the lectern, waiting to be read.
In 2016 came the correction at feast volume. Pope Francis elevated her memorial to a full feast day, and the decree restored the ancient title: apostolorum apostola. Whatever else one makes of the institution, the significance of the gesture remains. The church that carried the Western conflation for centuries formally restored her apostolic witness within its own liturgical life. You might say the older current resurfaced: the one that had always held matter worthy of the divine, finally speaking at the volume the ascetic current had enjoyed for so long.
The residue, and the feast
That is where the history ends. What follows is not another historical claim in the same sense, but an exploration of how ideas survive the institutions and language that created them. History can tell us how a story began; it cannot by itself explain why some stories remain living inside people’s bodies centuries after their theology has been forgotten.
If you’ve left all of it, or were never in it to begin with, you might reasonably ask what any of this has to do with you. Here is the uncomfortable answer: the theology secularized without dissolving. The framework harmed men and women both. The body as problem, desire as danger and pleasure as something requiring suspicion were preached to everyone, teaching men to fear their own flesh and their potency as a precursor to harm.
Body-as-problem left the pulpit and reopened in countless cultural forms. It appears in diet culture, with its language of “clean” eating and “guilty” pleasures. This is confessional grammar and language. It appears in the optimization reflex that treats the body as a correction project rather than a home, in the good-girl/whore sorting that operates in workplaces and dating cultures with no doctrine required, and in the “used goods” language that can emerge from people who have never opened a Bible.
And it lives somatically, beneath belief: the flinch at one’s own desire or the sense that pleasure must be earned. These ideas were transmitted not only through sermons but through mothers’ anxieties, inherited fears, dress codes, and a thousand ambient signals, which is why nobody had to consciously believe the theology for it to keep working, and why rejecting the beliefs, necessary as that may be, does not always finish the work.
What was installed through the body revises through the body. Something learned unconsciously needs repeated experiences in which pleasure is welcomed and integrated.
Which is where the feast comes back in. The church gave Mary Magdalene a feast, not a memorial. Abundance, gathering, the senses, food, celebration, the body at the table.
The feast of the body
So here is my proposal for July 22, offered to believer, leaver, and everyone in between, on nobody’s authority but your own.
This is what I’m doing. Taking the roses, making an altar to the vessel, having a private feast for my beloveds, and honoring the body in all it’s mess and beauty and desire. Take pleasure with my full attention. I want. I enjoyed that. This body is mine.
(If this is easier said than done, a reliable way through is accompaniment: a religious-trauma-informed therapist, guide, or witness with sensitivity to the body and nervous system.).
Happy feast day. This is the day of reclamation.
Sources: Peter Brown, The Body and Society; Rosemary Radford Ruether; Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen.
Listen: Some of the Rose Woman’s Past Programs on Sexuality
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